James Brinkley, MD, PhD

James Brinkley is an Associate Professor (Research) in the Department of Biological Structure at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he directs the University of Washington Structural Informatics Group. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and in the Division of Biomedical Informatics within the Department of Medical Education. He received a BA from Amherst College, an MD from the University of Washington, and a PhD (in medical computer engineering) from Stanford University. His primary research interests are in structural informatics, which he defined in 1991 as a subfield of biomedical informatics that pursues research and development of methods for representing, organizing, accessing, and utilizing information about the physical organization of the body. In his initial work, he developed one of the first three-dimensional ultrasound systems for acquiring, visualizing, and quantitating fetal volume. As part of this effort, he developed a method for representing spatial structural knowledge, called geometric constraint networks, which he later applied to other types of medical images and, at the macromolecular level, to protein structure determination. During the past ten years, Dr. Brinkley has focused his efforts on the development of a structural information framework, in which structure provides the basis for organizing, accessing, and visualizing a large portion of medical information. The projects that currently drive this effort are the Digital Anatomist information system, which provides online access to an evolving repository of spatial and symbolic anatomic information resources, and the University of Washington Human Brain Project, which provides a structural framework for organizing and integrating functional data about the brain. Dr. Brinkley has served on the National Library of Medicine's Board of Scientific Counselors, and on several National Institutes of Health special study sections. He currently serves on the editorial board of JAMIA, the program committee for the AMIA 2000 Annual Symposium, and several advisory committees for local and national medical informatics programs.